The ICE Death You Won't Hear About Today

One Week, One Detention Death, One Homicide

January 7, 2025

Beginning with gratitude (instead of just rage). Gratitude for Maanvi Singh, Coral Murphy Marcos, Charlotte Simmonds and their editors at The Guardian for publishing this important piece about who died in ICE detention last year. Gratitude for new subscribers (paid and unpaid). For collaborators of all stripes reaching out to support the work as it gets more urgent, and thus more overwhelming. Gratitude for another day to struggle towards change.

ICE Confirms 1st 2026 Detention Death

This afternoon ICE announced the death of 42 year-old Honduran citizen Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. According to the agency, he passed away in a hospital in Conroe, Texas January 5 after being admitted on December 23, 2025, “for complications related to congenital heart failure.” ICE arrested him November 17 in Houston and put him in two different facilities within a week — the Montgomery ICE Processing Center and the Joe Corley ICE Processing Center.

Both facilities are operated by ICE-preferred contractor The GEO Group, Inc., and its revolving door C-Suite. At least forty-five immigrants have died in or immediately after their release to a hospital from GEO facilities, including four of the seven people who died in December 2025.

The family of one person who didn’t survive their stay in a GEO facility- Martin Arellano Vargas - alleges GEO officials unlawfully destroyed video evidence that would have shed light on his 2021 death, which ICE never acknowledged. The family of another, Ismael Ayala Uribe, who died September 22, 2025, after being detained at GEO’s Adelanto, CA facility recently sued GEO and its for-profit healthcare provider, Wellpath, for failing to provide him adequate care. The brother of a third immigrant, Chaofeng Ge, sued in November for records pertaining to his very suspicious alleged suicide at GEO’s Moshannon Valley facility in August 2025 in Pennsylvania.

A GEO guard in Louisiana pleaded guilty last week to sexually abusing a detained immigrant over a three-month period at a facility in Louisiana—something you’d hope would have been evident from facility video and viewable by people paid to view and prevent it. No supervisor was charged, and the feds didn’t use the federal sex trafficking statute despite the allegations meeting all the elements.

Just last month, a 72 year-old Filipino immigrant died following his arrest and detention for ICE by GEO at the Montgomery ICE Processing Center. His name was Pete Sumalo Montejo. He was 72 years old, and he passed away from anemia, septic shock, and pneumonia.

Immigrants we know died in or following detention at the Joe Corley Processing Center are:

1. Edixon Del Jesus Farias-Farias A 26 year-old man from Venezuela who died April 18, 2024, four and a half months after his arrest “near Eagle Pass.” He reportedly died of “advanced” infectious diseases.” But we cannot independently confirm this report because ICE denied my request for expedited processing of FOIA requests for his Death Review, Healthcare and Security Compliance Analysis, and Mortality Review. Nearly 10 months later, in violation of the law, ICE has provided no response.

2. Fernando Sabonger-Garcia, a 50 year-old man from Honduras who died in August 28, 2020, of COVID-19 related respiratory failure, after being released from the U.S. Marshals Service in July.

3. Pablo Ortiz-Matamoros, a 25 year-old man from Honduras who died February 8, 2013, after being admitted to a hospital for jaundice, lethargy, and weight loss.

But the four grafs at the top of today’s press release are pretty much all we know from ICE so far. The remaining text contains knowingly false and misleading statements about the care people in custody receive in detention. Statements that are directly contradicted by years of internal death and mortality reviews involving hundreds of other detention deaths. Statements meant to mislead and propagandize those who don’t know all of the context above into thinking this is fine.

ICE also claims “Congressional requirements described in the DHS Appropriations Act of 2018 require ICE to publicize all reports regarding in-custody deaths within 90 days. You may access these reports on ICE.gov’s Detainee Death Reporting page.”

What ICE doesn’t tell the public in its death release is that the agency has stopped complying with this congressional appropriations act (which, once upon a time, was a violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act for which individual federal employees could be held accountable).

Today, the agency’s death reporting page mocks us with its citation to the “Congressional Requirements” while the entries below flout them.

Four people died in ICE custody 90 days or more ago whose detainee death reports are missing:

I asked ICE in writing yesterday whether it plans to comply with the 90-day deadline, and if so, when, for these individuals. I also asked whether the agency still believes it’s still subject to the 90-day detainee death reporting requirement.

They responded with copy-pasted-text of the Press Releases announcing the deaths of Ismael Ayala Uribe, Norlan Guzman Fuentes, and Miguel Angel Garcia Hernandez.

ICE is either painfully confused about the question, or won’t provide a straight answer. I followed up seeking clarification and will share what I hear back.

ICE Commits 1st 2026 Homicide

Few are going to notice Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres’s death in Texas because an ICE agent shot and killed an American citizen on the streets of Minneapolis today.

ICE Kills Unarmed American Woman in Minneapolis

Rene Nicole Good, 37 year-old wife, mother, poet, and probably not as shitty a guitar player as she thought. Her son was six. His father died in 2023. The child has now lost both mother and father.

Rene is gone and her child’s an orphan because a man with a gun, dozens of back-up agents, readily available tactical gear, air cover, the mass surveillance panopticon and the full force of the federal government behind him, said she made him fear for his life.

We can see for ourselves in multiple videos whether that fear was objectively reasonable as he shot her in the face and kept shooting. And we can wonder why his co-conspirators blocked medical access to a dying woman, bleeding in a steering wheel, with a glove compartment full of stuffed animals.

The President exonerated Rene’s killer via a “Truth” social post, in a predictable encore to yesterday’s gaslighting about other deadly violence in his name we all witnessed live and are now supposed to forget happened. The Secretary of Homeland Security dropped any pretense of a forensically driven, evidence-based investigation, and issued the same exoneration on Fox News.

Unless the City of Minneapolis or the State of Minnesota decides shooting and killing Rene warrants an investigation prior to an exoneration, there won’t be one.

Communities who resist, or register the slightest objection to the homicide of a woman on American streets by American immigration forces, will soon find out the intricate bureaucratic and/or actual violence of NSPM-7 and the subsequent Bondi memo.

Things may burn. Eyes from teargas. Hearts from rage. Or other, more replaceable, inanimate things. Democrat elected officials professing outrage will soon use the full force of their armed paramilitaries to surveil and repress demonstrators, break up protests, and protect those protecting the person who carried out the homicide on camera. Property will be protected. Law and order will be restored. And ICE will go back to being free to shoot and kill anyone they want on any street in America.

Jenn Budd and I spoke about this on Monday in a chillingly prescient way.

Counterinsurgency will ramp up, and state violence will escalate. Basically what the guys who are doing this have wanted all along.

And as it does, the federal government will be acquiring warehouses and logistics hubs for violently expelling human beings, all the while assuring the public that deaths in custody are the lowest they’ve ever been.